*** POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT ***
August has been a
slow month. Time seems to have elongated itself, gone backwards almost. Chronic
time distortion syndrome, it’s called, at least I think so. Each day seems like
a week, weeks turn into moths and they fly into lightbulbs. I read to escape,
pretty much always have done so, and the only bad thing about it is when the
experience is not worth it, is not worth the days and pages you’ve invested in
it, when the author is condescending to the point of patronising, when they
treat the reader like an idiot. When the reverse happens, when the book is as
much a gem as it can be, when reading it feels like flying, when the characters
seem to be your best friends, then it’s the most wonderful thing in the world.
This month has seen both these cases, and if anything else, it confirms what I
already suspected – that writing stories (anything, really) is one of the
hardest and most rewarding things is to share it with people and see the smile
on their faces when they’ve finished.
So. First up, I
want to talk about David Mitchell’s Cloud
Atlas. If you’re eagerly awaiting the Wachowski siblings’ new film (co-directed with Tom
Tykwer) adapted from the same book, now would be a good time to stop reading
and join us again after the break. And perhaps not; I don’t know what the film
is like.
The main problem
is the book’s structure, both its physical construction and in its nature. It
is, in its most simple form, a set of six interconnected albeit truncated
stories which, upon reaching the middle of the sixth story, reverse their order
and conclude their respective narrative fragments. I don’t know if that’s such
a good thing.
